Hi All, been away for a few days, for some reason I wasn't mailed these updates to the thread. Responses to various queries below, if I missed your question/feedback let me know.

Jean-Louis P wrote:

- is it possible with Mpdpup to use RAM as a local cache, feeding all music from the local or remote HDD to fast memory, as CMP does. If yes, how must the system be customized ?
- same question with an additional cache level with a small SDD ? It would not have to be so big : just the content of the current album.

In the second option, if would be quite straightforward for the ones like me who use an old laptop/netbook to replace former HDD with SDD as all the OS is on the CF card.

Hi Jean-Louis, playing back 100% from RAM is technically possible, but not particularly convenient today. The /tmp/ directory is essentially a RAM disk, anything copied to that directory will be stored in RAM but will never be saved to disk under any circumstances. One could configure MPD to follow symlinks from the music library. Then add a symlink to /tmp/music_location, and have MPD update the database for that directory. When it plays back that album it would do it from RAM.

One of my somewhat higher priority goals for a future release is to make all the above automatic for USB sticks with albums on them. Basically the idea is to put your playlist for critical listening on the stick. There would then be a script triggered whenever USB storage was plugged in that would search for audio content to load into /tmp, automatically update MPD, and possibly even begin playback automatically.

MPD itself doesn't have any RAM disk logic natively, and using a large buffer is a bit of a hack that I'm not confident even works as everyone believes. The MPD core developers don't seem to have much interest in RAM playback, so solutions like the one above are probably the best for now.

A small SSD could also be used, the steps would need to be roughly the same to leverage it - basically include a symlink to the SSD music directory in the MPD music folder. The bonus with SSD is the audio data would persist across reboots. If you installed mpdPup to SSD this directory would just be under /mnt/home

It's very straightforward to install mpdPup directly to an SSD - you just need to use other Puppy Linux install/setup wizards to do a Frugal install to the SSD. I've put instructions up for other users on this topic, if you can't find those instructions let me know.

Magellan wrote:

These commands didn´t work, or at least I couldn´t make them work I however borrowed a HiFace Evo the other day, and tried to figure out if it was possible to install the linux driver. Then to my great surprise and pleasure I realised the driver was already installed. Nice.

Another question. I am trying to fins out how to change the buffer. Is this possible?

Hi Magellan, Glad you were able to get it to work. Various buffers can be changed using mpdwizard under the audio->Tweaks section. Not sure which specific buffer you want to tweak. They can all be tweaked manually as well of course.

Andovai wrote:

mpdPup is great...but i want acpid...Is it possible??

Hi Andoval, Happy to hear it's working well for you thus far. ACPID should be installable using the Puppy Package Manager from the Debian repository. I don't include it by default because I don't really want a dedicated process for power control. You would also need to create an init script for it once installed. May I ask why you are looking for this?

Jean-Louis P wrote:

1) I have seen there is now an "audiophile linux" based on Linux Mint Debian. Seems very close to mpdpup, has someone tried ? Benefits / disadvantages for both systems ?

2) Has someone had mpdpup running on cheap appliances eg Pogoplug (sales now around 40$, still less $ than used laptop ).

Hi Jean-Louis, I haven't looked at AP Linux personally, but based on the threads I've read about it seems to be more oriented as direct replacement for Mac/Windows, and it requires a 'head' (mouse/key/monitor). I believe it uses Deadbeef, which does get a lot of good marks for sound quality, but my primary interest is in headless/appliance-like systems. It uses Pulse Audio, which is a nice abstraction layer for desktop functions but can be problematic for dedicated audio. As Mark van de Pas noted, the feedback I've read on the audio quality has mostly been positive, but overall it seems like that project's goals are very different from mine.

Regarding ARM based appliances, there are a couple issues here - one is the vast majority of low-end arm solutions use USB ethernet, this is going to cause a lot of contention on the USB bus when combined with a USB DAC. There are a few exceptions, but they seem to be few and far between. The other issue is the build system for the OS - mpdPup leverages the Puppy Linux build system. The Puppy Team is just starting to explore Raspberry Pi support, but the Pi is one of the platforms that uses USB ethernet. Not sure how easily their work could be extended to one of the more capable ARM boards. Regardless the current state of things from both hardware and software perspective leaves this low on my priority list. I would suggest looking out for embedded x86 solutions - the Alix boards are the classic reference here, but there are other contenders coming out all the time.

Mark van de Pas wrote:

Unfortunately test-driving MPD-PUP from a usb-stick with no NAS connected is very hard. Idolse should really optimise this. It's much too difficult too test-drive MPD-PUP from usb stick only. MPD-PUP could have a huge share of followers if only they could easy test-drive it and experience the very high sound quality coming from MPD-PUP.

Hi Mark, I've seen this criticism come up several times, I think some of it may have been from you on Audio Asylum, but I don't recall seeing specifics as to the issues encountered. Could you elaborate a little bit on the specific issues you ran into trying to use local storage? As jrling noted, support is there already. I know it's not perfect but in my experience I haven't had trouble. I do know a few users had trouble with booting from a USB stick and also using USB storage, as the device initialization can be odd on some systems.

When you mean test from a USB stick only, do you mean test 100% from a USB stick with audio on the same stick?

kocozze wrote:

I started mpdpup 0.9.3 on sony vaio laptot and i have two problems:
1- the internal sound card of laptot start at every boot with the volume at maximum (the speaker put out an annoyng noise), and when i set volume to 0 in alsa mixer, i set the correct audio device (hiface) and reboot, it's all as before!
There's a way to disable completly and finally the internal sound card? In bios there's no way to do this.
2 - Although I set the correct path to music folder (an external hd usb), mpd says "failed to start directory....:no such file or directory" "failed to load database: failed to open database file....no such file or directory", "database: could'nt start parent directory of db file ... no such file or directory"
On another laptot (an acer aspire) all was right!

For number 1, I don't think the mixer state is always stored correctly during the initial setup. I would suggest that after the 2nd reboot that you go back into alsamixer and re-mute the internal speaker. Exit, then type 'alsactl -f /etc/asound.state store', finally type 'save2flash' to commit the changes. Regarding number 2, you are probably running into the known issue mentioned above - USB stick boot device plus USB Music HD are a bad combination and I don't have an easy solution there, simplest solution for now is to install mpdPup to the laptop's internal storage.

PET-240 wrote:

Quick question, looking to use the Amanero as a USB output device, this is capable to pass DSD and am reading that the 0.17 can pass DSD over PCM, according to here anyways

Hi Drew, If the Amanero support USB Class 2 audio in general it should be able to work with mpd 0.17 - the product page indicates it does.

Hope all has been well, the Amanero does use the UAC2? for Linux, what I probably didn't make clear was can mpdpup put out DSD over USB?

Hi Drew, things are good here, hope all is well there too. According to the Amanero link you provided it does support UAC2 and any Linux kernel with like support (which includes mpdPup's kernel). As you note MPD 0.17 supports DSD, so it seems like everything should be good. Please note I don't have any DSD capable hardware to personally validate that everything works as expected.

Hi Idolse,
thank you for the answer, the first problem it's now solved with your indications...but the music path is still a problem!!!
Mpdpup is installed on the internal hard drive, not to usb stick, and the strange thing is that with another laptot (acer aspire) even if mpdpup is booting from usb pendrive all was fine!!
Any suggestion?

My own DSD-over-PCM (DoP) USB receiver/DAC implementation is not up and running yet, but about a year ago I applied the DoP patches to mpd-0.16 just to test things out - and this appeared to work OK - obviously apart from me not being able to test the actual audio output.

At that stage, mpd would only recognise DSD files within the Philips .dff container, but I think I read that recent releases of mpd now also recognise the Sony .dsf container format. I intend to stick with .dff since it's the defacto standard.

My patched version of mpd was able to accurately list my .dff files according to their tags (the tags were auto-created by sacd_extract) and play/pause/resume the tracks with elapsed time.
The only problem was, as I recall, that it wasn't possible to shuttle/search. I also recall that the mpd developer, Max Kellermann, discussed this on the dev-mailing list.

Hi Idolse,
there's a new with my problems with storage music.
I recap...
I started mpdpup 0.9.3 on sony vaio laptop.
Mpdpup is installed on the internal hard drive, not to usb stick.
Although I set the correct path to music folder (an external hd usb), mpd says "failed to start directory....:no such file or directory" "failed to load database: failed to open database file....no such file or directory", "database: could'nt start parent directory of db file ... no such file or directory"
The strange thing is that with another laptot (acer aspire) even if mpdpup is booting from usb pendrive all was fine!!
After i've read a post from old mpdpup version, i write in terminal
mkdir -p /mnt/home/mpd/playlists
mkdir -p /mnt/home/mpd/database

when i rewrite "mpd" now the only message is:
"Failed to load database: Database corrupted
database: dbfile "mnt/home/mpd/database" is not a regular file"

The only problem was, as I recall, that it wasn't possible to shuttle/search. I also recall that the mpd developer, Max Kellermann, discussed this on the dev-mailing list.

I believe this should be fixed now - the developer who was working on MPD's DSD support added DSD tag reading around the time of 0.17's release, according to the current plugin docs this should be good to go. Looks like tags for dff and dsf are both supported. That said, not sure how much DSD content is tagged - additional software may be required to tag your DSD files so MPD can index them.

I can only comment on DSD files on SACD - and these are definitely tagged.
The official DSD tagging regime is quite limited - I think it includes only Artist, Title, and Track Number.

But there's an unofficial ID3 tagging method for .dff/.dsf files - I think the origins of this were centred around the HydrogenAudio forum? I could be wrong on this latter point.

Anyway, sacd_extract cleverly reads the DSD tags on SACD tracks (Artist, Title, Track No) and also reads metadata from the SACD disk to obtain Year and Genre, then rewrites the combined information as ID3 tags, as it extracts the .dff/.dsf files.

The only problem, for me anyway, is the inability to re-tag. If an album is remastered, for example, the record company may define the year value as the year of the remaster, not the year of the original recording.
The record company might define a strange genre value, too.
In both cases, this is good reason to re-tag.

But there's currently no (successful) way to re-tag .dff/.dsf files.
The tagging function of Foobar2000 should work, but it doesn't. Once re-tagged in Foobar2000, the tags are unreadable by mpd.

I hope you don’t feel uncomfortable (or may be even offended) by me pointing at the difficulties when trying too test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick. The sound quality coming from MPD-PUP is truly excellent. I think every computer audiophile should (at least) hear (once) your excellent work on MPD-PUP. That’s why I tried too create some enthusiasm on the audioasylum for MPD-PUP. Once having heard the excellent sound quality coming MPD-PUP, many windows computer audiophiles will be very motivated too get MPP-PUP up and running, working with a NAS. But in a situation where there is no NAS yet, there is a big threshold when trying too test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick (with some music files on USB-stick, with no NAS, with no network).

For people (like me) with only basic (windows based) computer skills there where several problems when trying too test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick.

When booting from a freshly made MPD-PUP USB-stick (with Lili) I got this error:
- loading files needed too access disk drives…
- searching for puppy files….. error: can’t find puppy files puppy_mpd-pup_sfs.0.9.3.sfs not found. Dropping out too ram-disk console.
I could not get this fixed.
Finally I decided to unplug the SSD (thus avoiding this error).

Situation 2.
With the SSD unplugged, MPD-PUP now booted without any problems.
But where too put music files?
Only option left: on the USB-stick.
Problem 1: * Where too put music-files when the USB-stick is attached too windows?
On a windows-machine these directories can be seen on the MPD-PUP USB-stick:
/.local/share/albumbler
/.local/share/mpd_sima
/mpd/playlists
I made a directory: /test (with some wav-files in it)

Problem 2: How too point too the /test-directory inside the configuration wizard?
Once MPD-PUP has booted, the configuration wizard starts and most novice will somehow make there way until configuring the local storage. The wizard is indeed self explanatory. So no problems so far.
At ‘Configuring local storage’ the wizard will show this directory by default: /mnt/music.
And a small window with:
./
../
And: without being visual outside the bottom border line:
mpd/
test/
Because /mnt/music is the first thing one sees: most people climb up too: /, expecting too find the: /test-directory at /. But it is not there.
After this most people get lost in al kind of virtual directories.
These (virtual) directories where not there when the ‘/test’-directory was created on the USB-stick in windows. Very confusing. With some trail-and-error and some luck, in the end they still may stumble upon the: /mnt/music/test directory.
Click on test too select it, click OK and than: get an error.
They should have done: click on test too select it, press the space bar and than click OK.
With no file listing of the test-directory contents, one does hope the correct /test directory with music-files inside, now has been selected.
Initially being: /test in windows, now being presented as: /mnt/music/test in MPD-PUP.
This is very confusing for windows people.
The rest of the wizard and first re-boot is pretty straight forward.

After the first re-boot:
2. How too play a wav-file from USB-stick?
After the first reboot, newbie’s will see a prompt with this text:
“Music directory mounted, starting mpd.”
Now what?
From here newbie’s who want too test-drive MPD-PUP are on there own.
I tried the obvious: starting x. (typing xwin at the prompt)
At the top of the windows I saw a taskbar with icons, found out that the blue triangle is a player and with option 3 (browse) a listing of the music-files.
I finally finished my quest for test driving MPD-PUP from USB-stick and enjoyed the high sound quality coming from MPD-PUP!
Unfortunately over at the audioasylum nobody cared too follow / too hold on too the end.
That’s a pity. Despite off all your hard work and the high sound quality of MPD-PUP, it still was a too complex a pill to swallow.

Would it be of any help, if I wrote a short How-To test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick? (too placed at the end of the Installation/Upgrade chapter)

...Wow Idolse!
Now it's all ok! There's only two little fixes to make:
At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?
And it is possible to activate suspension instead of poweroff with the power button pressure?
Many thanks, really...

At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?
And it is possible to activate suspension instead of poweroff with the power button pressure?

Hi kocozze, glad we're making progress. Regarding MPD not starting, did you change the location of your music directory from /mnt/music? The MPD init script checks to see if that directory has content in it before starting MPD to prevent your music library from possibly being deleted.

Regarding poweroff - this is by design. mpdPup runs from RAM and is designed to be turned off 'brutally' as you say. You only need to shutdown safely if you have changes to the configuration you want to save, for this just log in and issue the 'poweroff' or 'restart' command. Making the power button and suspend work is technically possible, but not something I'm particularly interested in because it requires extra daemons running to manage that logic.

Mark van de Pas wrote:

Hi Idolse,

I hope you don’t feel uncomfortable (or may be even offended) by me pointing at the difficulties when trying too test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick.

Situation 1:
When booting from a freshly made MPD-PUP USB-stick (with Lili) I got this error:
Finally I decided to unplug the SSD (thus avoiding this error).

Situation 2.
Problem 1: * Where too put music-files when the USB-stick is attached too windows?
Problem 2: How too point too the /test-directory inside the configuration wizard?
Problem 3: How too play a wav-file from USB-stick?

Would it be of any help, if I wrote a short How-To test-drive MPD-PUP from USB-stick? (too placed at the end of the Installation/Upgrade chapter)

Hi Mark, I really appreciate the detailed feedback and enthusiasm, and no offense taken. Regarding your very first issue Situation 1, with mpdPup failing to load when an SSD was plugged in, this shouldn't have happened, and sounds like an upstream bug in Puppy Linux on the surface. This is the first I've heard of this problem, if other users are seeing the same thing I'd like to get to the bottom of it, but it may be unique to your hardware, as I know a number of other users boot off of USB with an internal SSD.

As to Situation 2, you're running into all these issues because I never considered this use case for mpdPup, and between your contribution and some of the other discussions the last few pages I'm seeing more and more validity in supporting this type of scenario to enable completely self contained testing from the USB stick.

As to your specific questions there, problem 1 - this could be anywhere, but we need to define a canonical location that will be used in future versions - I think a folder on the USB stick called 'audio' or 'music' would be appropriate.

For problem 2 - I can't actually point to a specific directory on the USB stick, at least not during the first boot. The stick is invisible to normal user space during the very first boot. I think instead of having the wizard point to it I may just need a third option in the drive configuration allowing to choose to use the USB stick instead of NAS or other local storage. This is because Puppy Linux uses the boot device/stick in a fairly specialized way even after the first boot - it's not treated like a normal drive, it's filesystem is under /mnt/home.

For problem 3 - essentially what I plan to do is create a symlink in the music library folder to /mnt/home/audio (or /mnt/home/<whatever directory on the stick>). This will also require that I change the default music directory from /mnt/music to another directory, e.g. /var/music. At that point I can create symlinks to all available music locations - e.g. /mnt/home/audio, /mnt/music/nas, /tmp/ramdisk, etc, etc. This has been suggested in the past but this is the first time I've seen compelling reasons to make that change. mpd.conf would need to be changed to follow symlinks if it's not already.

If you wanted to do this yourself today you'd need to do the above manually, create a new music library root such as /var/music, then symlinks to the audio directory on your USB stick. I think the number of changes required for a typical end user may be too much if you were thinking of writing a guide, but you could try it and decide for yourself. Regardless, I'll make this a priority for the next release and see if I can get it out sooner rather than later.

Good to have you back, and still very responsive and helpfull as usual, much appreciated.

When I think about Mark comment, he says he wants to be a kind of representative of "Windows users". It's me too.

The problem I feel is these guys and myself do not know a thing about symlink and Linux File structure and we get very easily lost in there as we want to listen to music and do not spend the time to learn the file system... I know its bad

kocozze wrote:
At the boot end, mpd don't start automatically.
And the pressure of poweroff button don't activate the shut down procedure (it turn off the pc "brutally"!).
It is possible to fix those?

Idolse write
Hi kocozze, glad we're making progress. Regarding MPD not starting, did you change the location of your music directory from /mnt/music? The MPD init script checks to see if that directory has content in it before starting MPD to prevent your music library from possibly being deleted.

Hi Idolse,
the location of music directory is already /mnt/music. I don't know why mpd don't autostart at boot-up. There's another way to do this?
For the shutdown with power button, at the new reboot mpdpup says "Improper shutdown..." and several rows of warnings. At the end it says "File system chek completed...press enter to reboot"
It no looks good!!
Thanks

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